Coastalblog

So this weekend was Mrs Coastaltowns birthday.

We went to York, it was nice.

We went to Grimsby, it wasn't, but her family live there, for some reason.

apologies for infrequency of blogging. NaNoWriMo is eating my life. 18,000 down, 32,000 to go. Luckily I'm within striking distance of twenty thou, the point at which it becomes harder to give up, and waste all that effort, than keep going.

I'm learning a lot about novel-writing as well. So it's a positive experience. A lot about the nuts and bolts of pacing, structure, characterisation. all the stuff us poets never bother with.

And no, you can't read it. It's fucking terrible.

God help me, it's November so it must be NaNoWriMo, my annual exercise in novel-writing masochism. I am, in fact, off to a flier this year and already well ahead of word count, which is pretty good. The great thing about NaNo is the purpose it serves at blasting away writer's block (which, with about three different deadlines currently hanging over my head, is no bad thing), the terrible thing about it is the fact that I will, for the rest of this month, have to find time every day to write a thousand odd words. This in the month that I take Roe away for a couple of days for her birthday. This in the month that I can't write at night (my usual M.O.) as the computer is in our bedroom. This in the month that my days off see me deep in the bowels of a restaurant's kitchen, roasting bones for stock, making desserts by the hundredweight, filleting seabass by the dozen and generally learning my trade as a humble prep chef. Clearly I have gone nuts.

Crikey.

Still, needs must. It's just the one month, at least it's not December, that really would be hard work. I'm still managing to keep the ugly reality of the C-word at arm's length. Things are a little tense at work at the mo, there have been high-profile quitters and things going wrong and everyone's a bit on edge.

Actually, immersing myself in fiction for a month suddenly sounds like an excellent idea.